


You're not ready for what's commin'

by cutebutpsyco



Series: Ironstrange Bingo 2019 Fills [16]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Agents of Shield influenced me, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Character Doubles, Evil Steve Rogers, Evil Tony Stark, Evil Wong, Evil doubles, Give the Cloak its own charaacter tag, How Do I Tag, IronStrange Bingo 2019, Just one character, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-14 16:32:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18480067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cutebutpsyco/pseuds/cutebutpsyco
Summary: IRONSTRANGE BINGO. FILL: NO POWERS [2] ||One of the consequences of the nerve damage was the loss of sensibility, which didn’t mean that they hurt less, quite the opposite, usually, but he couldn’t really feel the things he touched. He usually went by memory and could feel hot and cold in a very numbed way, but he never hold Tony’s hand before and that feeling was something completely new and different. Stephen never wanted to let that hand go.





	You're not ready for what's commin'

**Author's Note:**

> I want to thank again Fluffypanda on Discord for this because they gave me the idea of Stephen losing his powers. The this got out of my control ~~as always, how are you even surprised?~~ and evolved in something a little bit weird, which I hope you'll like it. 
> 
> I invented pretty much the plot of this while I was writing it, but it's strongly inspired by Agents of Shield (from season4) because I loved that subplot, and I thought it kind of worked in this context. 
> 
> As always, nothing belongs to me. Title from Heroes by Sleeping Wolf which I'll use a lot for other titles because I'm in love with this song. Un-betad.

Stephen woke up to a weird feeling. It was something at which the Sorcerer couldn’t give a name, something that was creeping inside his body and something that Strange hadn't ever felt before. It wasn’t totally unpleasant, but it was something that had a sort of bittersweet aftertaste. 

The first thing he registered was that he wasn’t in his bed in the Sanctum and the fact that his hands didn’t hurt. And while the first wasn’t completely weird - since when he and Tony started to date Stephen had passed a couple of nights to the Tower - the second one was worrying. There were good and bad days, just like for everything else, but it was an always present pain, something that reminded him of his own mistakes, something that Stephen couldn't and wouldn’t numb, not anymore, at least. And the idea of it being completely gone was scaring. 

And that was what had him waking up slowly, examining his surroundings and looking for something that can explain to him the reason for the mysterious end of his pain. He knew, even if his boyfriend was trying to keep it secret, that Tony was working on stabilizing gloves which would have allowed to the shaking to be reduced to the barely minimum, but they couldn’t shote the pain. Nothing could. 

He rose his back from the soft mattress and at that moment he realized he wasn’t in the Tower. He knew that room, even if he hadn't been there for the past five years or so. It was his old bedroom, in his penthouse in Manhattan, the house he loved so much and that lost in the desperate attempts to gain his hands back. And then he looked at those and found them surprisingly steady. The ugly scars were still there, but they didn’t tremble any longer. 

Stephen searched for his mobile phone, rapidly looking between his contacts and searching for Tony’s. And he felt a panic rising in his mind while he realized the billionaire’s number wasn’t in there. Ok, that was weird, but he saw the Cloak hovering in a corner, it’s collar looking up at him, and, a moment later, he could feel the comforting presence of the fabric around his shoulders. 

He caressed it absent-minded and then typed Tony’s number. He had to wait for the phone to ring more than it ever happened, and then a voice answered a moment later: “You reached life model decoy Tony Stark, please, remind me how do you get Mr Stark’s private number.”

“Tony?” Stephen asked, and he was surprised by the man answer. Tony was used to answering like that to the people who were bothering him, and, well, Strange was half sure that he didn’t, or better, that his boyfriend wasn’t too annoyed when he did it. From the other side, he heard the silence becoming more and more oppressing, and then a broken voice called his name.

“Steph… Stephen?” Strange knew that voice, it was the tone that Tony had when he was panicking. “I… Wong told me you…”

The Cloak tightened its embrace around his shoulders and Stephen felt it even weirder. He couldn’t really understand what was going on, but he didn’t like hearing Tony like that. “Babe, breathe, I’m coming to you, ok?”

He put Stark on loudspeaker so that he could keep speaking with him, and then started to look for his Sling Ring. “Yes… Please, I need to see you…”

“I’m coming, just, let me find the ring,” He said, feeling his own anxiety starting to creep through his mind when he tried to use his magic to track the damn thing. He lost it too many times and then decided that it was the best way to know where it was. What he didn’t expect, though, was that his magic didn’t answer to his commands. And the Cloak was still tight around his shoulders, just like he wanted to hug him. He couldn’t really understand what was happening, but when he tried again, his magic failed him another time. 

“Please, no portals,” Tony asked, and there was something terribly frightening in his voice. Stephen looked at his clothes, deciding the old t-shirt and comfy trousers he used to sleep were good enough for him to reach the garage and let the Cloak adjust on his shoulder, disguising a sweatshirt. 

“Ok, sweety, I’m coming,” He assured the other man, rapidly walking out the door and entering the lift. 

Ten minutes later, he was in the Tower penthouse. The man’s arms were around him a moment later. Stephen was too scared by the idea of the man in front of him going through a full panic attack to properly register the idea of going back into a car, but now that the other man was holding him he could feel his own shoulders starting to shake. He tried to recompose and then pushed back from Tony what was necessary to look at the man in the eyes. 

Stark looked wrecked and sleep deprived, and Stephen was sure that he could smell alcohol in his breath, but when he spoke his voice was what broke the Doctor’s heart: “Are you real? Is that you?”

He had no idea why the man was asking him that question, but he nodded anyway. They were together and there was time for explanation. Now, though, the only thing Stephen could do was taking softly Tony’s chin, raising it so that they were looking in the eyes and softly push his lips against the genius’s mouth. “I’ve never felt more real and more myself in my entire life.” 

He repeated the same words he used the moment he came back from the Soul Dimension, when Tony let go of Peter’s shoulders and closed with rapid steps the distance between them, kissing the man in the middle of the mess that the battlefield was. “I thought… When you disappeared into that portal everyone thought… Wong told me… And we couldn’t find Cloakie so we imagined that you were… Gone…”

Tony’s breathing was becoming more frantic again, but the man sunk into Stephen’s chest and the only thing Strange could do was hugging his boyfriend. He waited for him to stop to shake again before speaking. 

“I don’t remember anything of what you are telling me,” He confessed, looking at the blank expression in the other man’s eyes. It was a silent invitation for him to continue and so Stephen did: “I woke up in my bed, back in my house in Manhattan and my hands weren’t hurting, but magic failed on me.”

And then Tony took one of his hands and, for the first time, he could feel the warm and strong grip of his boyfriend. One of the consequences of the nerve damage was the loss of sensibility, which didn’t mean that they hurt less, quite the opposite, usually, but he couldn’t really feel the things he touched. He usually went by memory and could feel hot and cold in a very numbed way, but he never hold Tony’s hand before and that feeling was something completely new and different. Stephen never wanted to let that hand go. 

If not that in the precise moment the thought crossed his mind, Stark brought his hands to his lips and Stephen felt a dumb smile appearing on his face. 

“You are so beautiful,” Tony whispered, and Stephen didn’t even care that he knew it was not true. “I thought I’d lost you. And whatever happened, we can figure it out. I’ll call Wong, and then, well, I don’t know if you want to be a doctor or a wizard or whatever, but, you scared the shit out of everyone.”

“Tony,” Stephen whispered, he was still smiling, while his tone was one of fake annoyment. “I don’t know what does this mean,” He said, raising his hand so that his boyfriend could see that it wasn’t shaking any more, even if Stephen knew he could feel it in the fingers of the hand he was still holding. “But yes, you should call Wong and you should tell me what happened.”

“Fri, did you hear the doctor?” He asked, and without giving any kind of confirmation, a moment later the librarian’s voice filled the penthouse. Stephen noticed that Tony didn’t let go on his hand, not even when, after a short conversation, Wong appeared in the middle of the room. 

“Strange?” The other Sorcerer said the moment he saw the men in front of him, and even if he sounded annoyed, Stephen knew him well enough to feel a certain undertone of relief in his voice. “And the Cloak of Levitation. What happened?”

His question fell in the silence, but the man was already walking around him, orange mandalas creating the scheme of weird spells Stephen had never seen before. “Your magic,” He said, after a while. “I’ve never witnessed to anything similar before. Stark, can you please let his hand, two minutes?”

Stephen nodded, and only then Tony stepped back. There was something unsaid. Both Tony’s reaction and the fact that Wong seemed careful around the billionaire told that much. The point was that Stephen couldn’t remember. And for someone with his memory, that was hell on earth. 

“It seems like whatever happened when you went through that portal locked up to your magic in a portion of your brain at which you can’t access in this dimension,” Wong explained, and Stephen tensed. As a doctor, and one who worked with brains and nerves, Stephen knew that the ‘humans only use 10% of their brain’ thing was bullshit, but he also knew that there were areas of the brain at which the conscious couldn’t access. “It also gave you the life you had before coming to Kamar-Taj. Your hands, at least.”

“My house, too,” Stephen answered, in a whisper, and the moment Wong finished his examination he took Tony’s hand back in his. “But Tony and the Cloak? If that portal wanted to reset me, why leave them in my life?” 

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer, but, at the same time, he was glad that the Cloak and his boyfriend stayed by his side. Not remembering about the entire portal thing was bad enough. Wong shook his head. 

“I don’t know,” He answered. “We all thought you died fighting at the other side of the portal, and I’ve never heard of anything like this before. I’m going to search, but I read almost all the books in the library three times and this is the first time something like this happened.”

Stephen nodded and he saw that Tony was thinking about something when Friday’s voice alerted then that there was a steam of magical energy near the Hudson outfall. Tony turned toward the librarian before starting to suit up. “We might use a little bit of hocus-pocus out there, Harry Potter.” 

And in the beat of an eye, thewere gone leaving Stephen alone. He had no clue of what happened the day before, but asking Friday fo footage from Tony’s helmet was enough to fill him up with the basic information. First of all, the fact that it didn’t happen the day before but a week prior. 

Apparently, they were fighting against some magic user who seemed to have taken to attack Peter, causing Tony to put his life in danger more than he was used to, which was way too much anyway if you asked Stephen. The Doctor in the footage froze the other sorcerer in the middle of the battle and then sent him somewhere - Stephen knew where he sent the man, the hidden cells in Kamar-Taj - before trying to close the weird portal that the other opened in the middle of the street. The video ended there, but Stephen didn’t even remember those few minutes. 

And then there he was, useless, absolutely incapable of doing anything which wasn’t standing in front of a screen and waiting for his superhero boyfriend to come back. He used to hope for a life like that, three years before. He used to ask for his hands to stop to tremble so that he could practise surgery again. And now he could have. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to. 

For the first time since he woke up, that morning, the Cloak left his shoulders, hovering in front of him as if it was trying to tell something. He hated that now, without his magic, he seemed unable to understand it, but he also knew that his relic had a lot of ways to make itself clear, and it was smart enough to understand how to use them. At that moment, for example, it took his wrist and dragged him closer to the glass wall of the Compound, pointing furiously to somewhere, somewhere Stephen had no idea where it was. 

Understanding that it wasn’t leading anywhere, Cloakie started to pull and push its human toward the lift and then it pushed a random bottom that led to one of the lab floors. And there, Stephen stopped, looking at the enormous symbol in the middle of the hall that led to the different labs. Bloody red on black, stood an octopus with a skulled head. He knew it, and he couldn’t believe his eyes at the same time. 

“Hydra,” He whispered, to no-one in particular, and then he was running toward the garage, forgetting the fact that he could take the lift to reach it. “The portal… It probably led me to another dimension where… Where Tony, myself, even Wong… We are Hydra,” He said, and now he was sure he was speaking with the Cloak. Probably his relic followed him through the portal because it knew, or, at least suspected. “I’ve probably locked my own magic when I realized it so that I wouldn’t get fooled into using it to help them, but I didn’t consider that I could lose my memory,” It made sense, he decided. He gave himself a life he didn’t want anymore so that he could understand that something was wrong. 

The problem was that he made it too real, and he couldn’t totally forget about how heavenly Tony’s touch felt - no, he wasn’t going there with his mind. The Cloak nodded against his cheek while Stephen took his car in the middle of the traffic of New York. He needed to go back to his own dimension, hoping that the Stephen from the one where he currently was didn’t hurt his Tony and their teammates. “How do I go back?” 

He didn’t want to think about all the lives this Stephen took, he didn’t want to think that he could have easily understood it because Wong’s mandalas were strange. He should have had. He was the Supreme Sorcerer, and yet he had too many things to learn. The Cloak was acting as the best mystical GPS ever, but it didn’t take so long for Stephen to understand where they were heading: whatever threat Evil Friday alerted Tony and Wong on was probably his only way back. He didn’t have time, for what he knew, they could have closed the portal already. And Stephen would never see his Tony again. 

That thought was enough for him to downshift and speed up driving like he never had, not even before his accident. And then, then he reached the Hudson and found face to face to two identical teams of Avengers. And he had no powers at all. If he knew his own magic enough, the only way to bring those back was once back in his dimension. 

He considered his options, trying to understand who were his teammates, but everything was a mess and there was no way to distinguish them. And then he saw something, or better, someone. Steve Rogers was fighting against himself, and Stephen tried not to think about how weird a Hydra Captain America could sound. And the point was, whatever this dimension was, there was something nobody knew. Not even Tony, his Tony, at least: Stephen and Steve were actually friends. They grew closer shortly after the defeat of Thanos, once everyone was back. Steve started to suffer from nightmares and the cold, perfect façade of the American paladin started to crumble.

He was still the same, in front of everyone else, but once Stephen found him in on the top of one of the training facilities of the new Avengers Compound that the Sorcerer was magic-proofing. The Captain looked very much on the verge of playing the Russian roulette when Strange reached the roof. 

“Bucky is the only person why I didn’t do it, yet,” he whispered, maybe to nobody in particular, even if Strange was sure that the super soldier heard him coming. “But sometimes I think he’s better off me. I’m just being selfish. I pretend my love is enough and I’m keeping him back. It’ll be easier for him if I’m not around.”

“I wouldn’t say that, Captain,” Stephen answered. It wasn’t even out of habit, he really believed in those words. “I can explain to you why losing the only person who’s keeping him grounded would be worse for Barnes’s recovery in medical terms, but I’m not sure you’d understand and I’ll end up boring you. So I’ll give you the short version of it: do the selfish thing, is far less selfish than you think.”

From that night on, they found them every couple of days on that roof, and they spoke. There wasn’t a reason to keep it secret, but there had never been a real reason to inform the other and, at that moment, not having done that seemed to be even better. Maybe the Doctor Strange and Captain Hydra from the other dimensions weren’t friends. He didn’t care, at that moment, he couldn't bring himself about thinking about that. All he wanted was to find the portal and having his powers back, helping people, even if that meant giving up his hands again. The lives of the innocents were far more important. 

“Captain,” He said, and both the Steves turned to look at him. He couldn’t say if even the other Avengers saw him, but it didn’t matter. “Do the selfish thing.” 

And, at that, just one of the Captains smiled, taking the other by surprise and knocking him over before jogging to Stephen. “Doctor, we’d been missing you.”

“Where’s the portal?” He asked. 

“The other side of the river.”

“Ok, I have a car. If I reach it, I can be more helpful,” He replied, nodding briefly to Rogers. “The other Strange?”

Something that looked like a smirk appeared on Steve’s lips. “Wong trapped him in Kamar-Taj, even if I’m not sure if Tony got his hands on him before.”

At least he didn’t have to fight against himself powerless. “Try to bring everyone close to the gateway as soon as I got through. My powers don’t work in this dimension.”

“On it,” Steve said. “And if I were in you, I’d use Cloakie to reach the portal. It seems on the right mood to choke some supervillain.”

The relic waved at Steve before dragging Stephen mid-air just to prove the other man’s point. Strange had no idea of when it became Rogers’s friend but after Thor told him that apparently, it spoke to a frequency that only Groot could understand he wasn’t questioning the Cloak’s behaviour anymore. It saved a lot of time. 

Once he flew through the portal, Stephen felt his magic came back in his body. It started from his hands, and it started suddenly, but he was used to the pain, even if the short time without feeling it seemed to be a sweet variation of the theme. He wasn’t ready to give up to everything he always fought for in exchange for some partial relief, though. He waited that every one of his team walked on the other side before closing the portal once for all. 

The moment he finished the spell, though, the quantity of magic that crossed his body in a row started to make his headlight and he knew he was falling against the ground even before hitting it. Except that he didn’t. A pair of strong arms were around his body, warm and worried whiskey brown eyes in front of him. This Tony didn’t smell of alcohol, this Tony had eyes filled with tears. 

“I thought I’ve lost you,” He whispered, helping Stephen to seat on the asphalt, he kneeled in front of him. “I love you, Stephen. Please, never leave me again.”

Stephen nodded. “I love you too. And I’m not planning to go anywhere where you can’t follow any time soon.”

They both knew Stephen had to travel in different dimensions, but they both knew it wasn’t that what they were speaking about.

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments are the air I breathe and the reason why I write, so make ur girl happy.
> 
> **wanna say 'hi'? do you have a prompt for me?** find me on [tumblr](https://ironstrange-is-the-endgame.tumblr.com/).  
> find my entire ironstrange bingo card on [dreamwidth](https://myrcellabaratheon.dreamwidth.org/3827.html) and [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/511160).


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